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For the first time in a thousand years, there was thunder in the temple

Hidden inside the heavy terra-cotta barrel at the back of the practice hall, eleven-year-old Malao flinched with every BOOM, every CRACK! Thunder inside their cory dragon

Malao shivered According to legend, dragons controlled the wind and the rain, the lightning and the thunder Stay in a dragons good graces, and your crops would receive enough rain for a bountiful harvest; anger a dragon, and your crops would be washed away—along with you, your house, and your entire faon too far, and it would deliver a special kind of storniting everything that remained with its fiery breath

A dragon must be the reason Grandmaster had made Malao and his four “te—squeeze into the barrel Grandmaster had told them they were under attack by soldiers, but Malao knew zhen Teon What could those thunderclaps be but the crack of a dragon snapping its enormous tail?

A dragon lashing its tail re and his chain whip Ying had left Cangzhen in a rage the year before, upset because he had been trained his entire life as an eagle but had alanted to be an all-powerful dragon Swinging his chain as the closest Ying had ever coon tail of his own

Malao shivered again Ying had vowed to return to Cangzhen to punish Grand was no fool He would never attack Cangzhen and its one hundred warrior uaranteed victory And for that to happen, he would have to have acquired power beyond that of mortal men—

Oh, no! Malao thought Maybe Ying has figured out a way to transforrown scales and a tail and—

KA-BOOM!

Malao raced through thehim deeper and deeper into the forest He had to put as zhen Teerous than ever

Malao leaped off the gnarled arht sky

He landed on the li maple and paused He was lucky to be alive, let alone to have escaped uninjured The sazhen Temple was in ruins, and its warrior monks—Malao's older brothers and teachers—were all dead